


The Fantastically Inaccurate Delusions of Dying

by Simply_Caffeinated



Category: Original Work
Genre: Falling In Love, High School, Lung Cancer, M/M, Mild Sexual Content, Minor Character Death, Sad, Slow Romance
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-12-23
Updated: 2017-12-22
Packaged: 2019-02-18 20:02:26
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,763
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13107528
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Simply_Caffeinated/pseuds/Simply_Caffeinated
Summary: Dying is a part of life. It's one of many things that change and shape you as a person. Death is a part of life, as is laughing and falling in love—stupidly in love. It's inescapable and blunt. It's drenching my world like gasoline and lighting me on fire. My name is Renè Berne. I like being alone, thinking about death, and not crying. This is my world, my death-stricken, love—sunken world.





	The Fantastically Inaccurate Delusions of Dying

When I was seven, my cat died. While most kids my age recount those kinds of events as practically traumatizing, I remember not really caring that much. My mom assumed it was shock or a misunderstanding. She kept telling me "He isn't coming back, Ren, not ever. He... he's probably in a better place." My mom, she wasn't ever that good with emotions; or religion, really. 

She was raised a heavy Catholic and from that, got pregnant at seventeen. Her parents put her through college on the basis that she live with them and never even _breathe_ a man's name again—especially not my dead-beat dad's. I think they blame themselves, which is probably justified, but to this day, they still treat her like a little girl. I'm understandably treated like a stick of dynamite in the house. 

Two months and three days after my thirteenth birthday, my mom snuck me from my second story bedroom and through my grandparent's white picket fence into her silver Audi and all the way to Bennet Hospital, a two-hour drive from Bayfield Wisconsin. On the way, she refused to answer any questions. 

When we pulled up, I finally snapped, or at least my version of snapping.

"I won't get out until you tell me what's going on, mom." She had already unbuckled and grabbed her purse.

"Ren, come on, this is serious."

I locked my car door. "I know, and so am I. Tell me why we're here or you can walk through those doors alone." She sat back down, slamming her door and putting her head on the steering wheel. 

"Just—why are you doing this? Just come inside."

I shook my head slightly, even though she couldn't see me. 

"Mom—" I put my hand on her arm. "Who is it in there?" She gulped hard and began to cry. She didn't cry like other people, she cried very quietly. Her shoulders, they didn't exactly shake, they more like rippled with the waves of pain rolling over her.

"It—it's your father." I pulled my hand back, lacing my fingers together. "He has, uhm, cancer, I think. Lung stuff." She swallowed another wave. "Just like grandpa." 

I remembered when Grandpa had been in the hospital. His cancer had been caught early, they'd been able to remove it. I had a feeling this was different.

"Is he—" I squeezed my hands together tightly "Is he going to die?" My mother seemed to let out a sob at that, but I couldn't be sure. It was too out of character. 

"Yes."

I unlocked my door and stepped out. She took a few more seconds, breathing in and out, before raising her head from the wheel, a slight red mark now imprinted on her forehead, and stood up as well.

"Alright." She said swiftly, moving around the car towards the entrance.

"Alright." I answered. 

I took her hand as we walked the short distance to the entrance and pushed the glass doors open together. 

Once inside, the harsh white lights blinded us both.

 _Why do they do that?_ I wondered. _As if the people here aren't having a miserable enough time already_. 

The woman at registration was nice enough, it looked like she'd had a long day. I noticed a large family huddled around each other in one of the corners of the relatively small room and inferred they may be the cause for this. They were all talking in cold, harsh whispers, some holding hands, others glaring at the floor. I didn't feel like intruding. While my mother asked about my father, I took a seat across the room from the family. The tv was broadcasting some late night talk show. The oddly methodical laughter coming from the screen felt scrutinizing. Why would there be laughter here? People were dying. 

_People are always dying_. I thought, _Always dying. Always laughing. Always doing so many things._

I wondered how many people, however, had sat waiting to see a dying father before. How many kids, sitting in a too-bright room watching too-happy television with an all too confusing past and a too-far-gone father?

My mother walked over, pale and tired. 

"I wish we had stopped for coffee." I smiled softly at her. She would have let me have as much as I wanted, I knew. She didn't know it wasn't normal to give a kid my age coffee. She didn't know a lot about normal parents. She was far from one.

"Hey mom, there's a comedy show on." She glanced up right as the audience found something hysterical. 

"That doesn't feel right." She said back. I nodded. 

"Feels tantalizing." She nodded, too, leaning back against the white wall. 

"Tantalizing." She repeated, closing her eyes. 

We sat there for awhile. I thought she had fallen asleep and was about to get up and wander when she muttered,

"The woman told me we can see him in about an hour. He's asleep right now." 

I watched her mouth as it moved; I watched how her tongue barely lifted, how her neck stretched to form the words, how her lips parted just slightly to let words escape into our cold world. I crossed my fingers in my lap. 

"Okay."

 

Thirty minutes passed, The Simpsons came on. A woman wearing purple socks and pearls walked solemnly to the desk and asked for it to be changed. The tv was promptly turned off. 

"Mom?" My voice was too loud now that no one was inappropriately laughing over it. She shuffled in response. "What's his name?" The silence made me dig my nails into my palm.

She opened her eyes slowly, first focusing on the black screen of the tv, then on the grey squares on the carpet, then on my red shoes.

"Your father." It wasn't a question, the way she said it, but I responded 'yeah' anyway.

She smiled. It was small, it was sad, it held so much history. 

"His name is Renald. Renald Reece. Head of the football team and top of his math class. Highschool sweethearts with a catholic's daughter. Father at 18, cancer victim at 31."

My teeth clicked together as I started shivering. 

"Ren." I said, clenching my jaw to keep from shaking. She looked at me, but I wouldn't look back. 

"Yes," A curl escaped from her headband into her eyes "Does that upset you?" I didn't answer. I never answered, because, at that moment, a nurse walked in. 

"Family, to see a Ronald Reece?" My mother stood up, shouldering her purse. 

"It's Renald." The nurse nodded, leading us through the doors. Doors that, to me, separated a fatherless boy from a boy who'd lost one. I wasn't sure I wanted to become the latter.

 

My father had my hair, thick, tangled at the top and sticking up at odd angles. That was the first thing I noticed. The second was the grey in his beard. Patches of off colors littered his otherwise dark brown facial hair. His eyes were closed and tubes were attached to a few areas of his body. A machine broke any kind of silence we would've made.

"Mr. Reece, family to see you." The nurse said quietly before turning to us. "I'll give you some privacy." My mother nodded politely. 

As soon as she'd left, my father opened his eyes. 

"Margret?" His voice was gruff and broken. It was like he had eaten glass and now spoke through the shards. He acted as if somewhere inside of him, he was cracked. A piece of what made him work had been taken, or destroyed. 

"Yes, Ren, it's me."

Before that night, I'd always considered people who named their kids after themselves as narcissistic. I'd thought it was weird, gross, even. But, in that room, the only way I could think of it was that it was necessary. It was odd to think like that, I realize. I was thinking _If he can't live it to its end, I should._

It didn't seem to me that he had gotten to complete his life. If I could do anything, it'd be to carry his name out to the end for him. My name became more to me than just a title that night. It became, to an extent, a burden. A self-pronounced burden. 

My father smiled so... so differently. I'd never seen a man look like that before. I couldn't have described it if I'd tried all my life—It was a moment seared into my head, and perhaps my heart.

"You came—" He saw me then. His words seemed almost as if they were cut right from his mouth. 

He looked dazedly from my mother to me, asking a million silent questions. 

"I couldn't just let you—" My mother began, "He had to see you, Ren. He had to know."

My father blinked a few times "He—He's beautiful." That was the first and only time in my life I've ever been called beautiful. "He looks like you." My mother took my hand, probably smiling, probably rippling. 

"I always thought he looked like you." Her voice cracked.

He couldn't stop looking at me, and I looked back at him. His broad shoulders, sharp nose, strong jaw, sunken eyes, he looked too young to die. That's what I was thinking. Too young. Too many things he needed to do, too many years his name would have to give up. I was too young to watch him die. 

We sat with him for a few hours. Or maybe only 40 minutes, or 20 seconds.

 _Hospitals do that_ , I thought. But that isn't true. Dying does that. It slows time down. Maybe that's a gift from the universe. The gift to spend every second, every extended death-defying second with a person before the seconds run out and they get taken away.

 _Who takes them?_ Thirteen years of logic and reasoning went into answering that question. I never did. I doubt I ever will. 

 

On December fourteenth, 2015 at 4:03 am, my father died.

 _Too young to die._

"He's never coming back," My mother sobbed silently into my shoulder. "He won't ever come back."

I didn't cry. 

That night, I realized a very important thing: Every person handles sadness differently. For my mother, she held it inside. She let it out silently, shaking like a boat in a hurricane as wave after wave hit her. She let herself be swept up in storm.

For me, I sat up a little straighter. I bit my lip, I clenched my fists, I held my mother. And I didn't cry.


End file.
